When Memories Make Themselves Heard
by sofia-carby
Summary: She is in Africa, losing hope and life. He is in America, hoping and aching to see her. Along the way they both realize what they really feel for each other and he goes to save her, but is it too late? Slight spoilers for T&C.


**Truth and Consequences in written-down emotions. They just re-aired T&C here in Sweden and winter air (there's so incredibly much snow now, it's crazy and I'm so happy!) and subtitles made me look at it differently. It is twisted with my mind so there are spoilers but not really. Yes, I am vague. Inspired by lyrics and harsh vocals and my naïve Swedish mind. This was inspired by the songs **_Time_** and **_Africa_**, both by **_E-type_** (which, yes, are embarrassing songs but Time is probably the catchiest song I've ever come across and it makes me think of Asia/airplanes so therefore this fic. Give it a listen of you feel like listening to catchy euro-pop) It was also inspired by**_ Into the Ocean_** by **_Blue October_** who I absolutely adore. Somehow I was inspired by **_the Hunger Games_** - no idea why, haha. **

**Please review and you are the prettiest ever. **

**---**

_Time, time take me where_

_I'm no longer a stranger_

_**I'll do anything**_

Dry ropes with ragged ends dig into her sandpaper flesh. It hurts, oh it hurts. But she does not care, she ignores the dust that glues to the high cave of her mouth, suffocating her, making her feel like she is buried alive in an ocean with swirling fire-bubbles. She thinks perhaps one of her ribs is bending the wrong way under pressure; it feels as if it is cutting and caressing all of her soft jelly-insides. She is covered in crooked peachskin, anger rising goose flesh on her bare limbs. Sun is hot through dirt-caked windows and it showers her back with blisters. She kind of likes it. The pain makes her feel alive in this mudroom of death breath. A man is sitting in front of her, crouching like a darkness-haired lion – backed up by Death - preparing to swallow prey whole, crush it under a razor-jaw. She stares into his eyes, not letting a flicker of pain cross her beaten features.

Death just smiles.

'_Don't you recognize me?'_ whispers he.

She is not prey and she does not answer any of his questions, even if his teeth tear her skin and hope in half.

**---**

_One more time_

_I leave behind just burning bridges_

_When memories make themselves heard_

_Go away - go away_

'_**You know that you gave me your word…'**_

Regret is ice-hot against his being. Meaning is on the other side of the slowly suffocating Earth, her hate so strong and sewed so deep under his skin it makes him ache to rip the stitches out. He is lying on a part-naked mattress, covered in stains of liquor and remorse – growing bigger each day and unable to wash clean. Every single time he replays their last conversation under his sleep-stiff lids, he wonders what he should have said if perhaps maybe he should have taken her arms in his palms - damp with foam-edged currents of mixed emotions - and never let go. Maybe possibly he should have told her how sorry in every corner of his heart he was. He thinks of her willowy bending frame, heavy with anger on his chest in Israeli ground, spitting saliva-truths in his face. He left her in a country that is not home.

He turns to his side, his whole grown man weight beating down upon his still-aching shoulder. Good. Suddenly his phone beeps out loud, the sharp noise melting with strands of never ending traffic voices outside his gaping window. Suddenly he cannot breathe, his lungs are stretched tight over the summer air and he reaches for his phone, fingers wet and hands clammy; covered in eagerness and sticky with hope. He almost drops it and fumbles and curses his awkwardness. He is blinded for several seconds by the light of the display and he can hardly see numbers and letters apart from each other on the sickly green screen. Then life focuses and it is not the letters of her name or the numbers that would connect them and he whispers under his breath.

'_Fuck.'_

His hopes crush to dust-clouds one caress of a second before his phone does.

'_Why can't you call me?'_

His ceiling fan whirls June-air about his hot room and he does not find any answers in the frozen yellow light of semi-dawn.

**---**

_I am here._

_There must be somewhere I can breathe._

_**Now take me there**_

It would be nice if he'd let her breathe. Perhaps let her suck in a mouthful of air so she wouldn't feel like her brain is hammering the insides of her skull. Her wingbones are pressed against her spine – bowstring-tense and flat - following the dry crook of the floor. She screamed at first but then mercy put a lid on the pain so she is now only breath-starved. Her palms are splinter-kissed by the harsh floorboards and she thinks he has her curls in his monster fist. She cannot be sure. What she can be sure of, however, is the blood and saliva in her mouth; hot-bubbling and mixing with other kinds of bodily fluids that is not hers and she tries not to taste them on her tongue. Her fingernails are carving crescents in the non-fat of her sunken cheeks; balloons filled with air skinned of hope. She is numb under her ribs and over her heart. She cannot feel the broken bones (she thinks there are four) in her foot but she knows they are just hanging onto the necks of her legs in slippery tendons. The dance they do makes her feel like all of her bones are dislocated from her mind and her knees are scrubbed sore with his offbeat rhythm. She is just a ragdoll and she closes her eyes, trying to steal air from the outside of the heat-cracked window. This is not what life should taste like.

Lying there she thinks of Tony. She closes her eyes and imagines him there; a normal day back home. Home. Is there another word as beauty-caressed? She thought she hated him before she realized what hate means. Hate is the man whose palms are sweaty and all over and pressing into her bone-peaked, aching body. Hate is this place, bars and locks making sure to keep life's breath out. Tony isn't hate. She was just grief-stricken and so, so confused after Michael's death. Her guilt was a hard shard all over and Tony's tender looks just made it all worse. Oh, how she wanted to hate him. Now she wonders why she never told him good-bye. Why she never told him she forgave him.

_Please, oh please please dear God, let me breathe._

Death just smiles.

**---**

_I'm just a normal boy that sank when I fell overboard_

_My ship would leave the country, but I'd rather swim ashore._

_I want to swim away but don't know how._

_**Sometimes it feels just like I'm falling in the ocean**_

In July he fails to glue a smile on his features so he cracks.

'_It's not normal.'_

'_No, it's not.'_

Heavy wings grow lighter and relief is singing through his veins then, now he will get help figuring out why he hasn't heard even a fragment of her breath for months. As days are becoming shorter and as twilight ink-dips the sky sleep doesn't take him. He sits and tries to figure out why she stumbled, tripped, willingly walked off the sand-covered face of the Earth. He is not as alone in his dirt pool of worry now and it makes him feel a bit calmer, even if icy sweat still covers his forehead every night, a sour aftertaste of nightmares and words he never said. Somewhere along the way he realizes that he thinks he might he possibly; he fucking loves her.

**---**

_Round and round we go. Time must come to make a_

_choice; is this how I want to live?_

_Still don't know what's on when I woke up to the edge,_

_**I must learn how to forgive**_

She is blindfolded. Rough cotton is shadowing her sight of Hell grazing Earth. She has her eyes open, though. They cannot take that away from her. In some ways it is a relief. Now she does not have to see the dried up blood-beds covering her arms and she hardly sees his face any longer. He is not there right now. Saleem. She will know if he comes, his raspy panting deep down in his disgusting throat, the floor creaking under his belly-fat and heavy sins. When the familiar sounds of him getting ready dig into her ears she just starts to hum bird-like, childishly pretending she does not exist, none of this is real. They place lumps in her dry throat and make her stomach fold in on itself and press out against the lining of her roasted flesh. One of her teeth is gone. It cut in half that one time when she refused to utter a single word. He got angry then, the white-red cobweb and the brown of his eyes blazing. It had felt like his fist met hard stone then but he only embedded half of her tooth deep in his raw knuckles. She had laughed because she had not hurt in her physical shell one splinter. That bubble of smile-sound only bought her more bruises on her purple thighs but that did not matter. Death is always there, though. She feels hopeless but calm even in this place where he usually shreds Hope and Calm before they can step over the cluttered threshold.

She is thinking a lot about and under life when she sits there. She wonders why her arms are so hot to the touch when frost is embracing her soul. She wonders where God is in all of this. She wonders why you never appreciate air until it is snatched from out and under you. She wonders why the English language has so many strange words that dance about each other, failing to fall correctly on her foreign lips. She wonders if Death will ever go away. She wonders why she never found love in any dusty corner of the world. She knows the moon in August looks like a swollen baby belly painted in shades and smears of dirty gold and suddenly she wonders for some reason that cannot be explained if maybe Tony sees if for her.

Death just smiles.

'_Don't hold your breath,'_ whispers he.

**---**

_One more time I saddle up and leave for no mans land,_

_like so many times before._

_They say that lightning strikes not once but twice_

_and I'm not going to stay._

_**Because I can't take it anymore**_

When summer is dying and folding into fall he is an insomniac. He tells himself it is the caffeine but really it is hope. They tell him she has died but he does not believe or take their words they dangle before him. He knows. He knows she is on the other side because nightmares no longer embrace him in his sleep. He suffocates their lies they try to bore into his bones, adding to the gaps she left when she tore her love away. He wants to go to her. So he does. He needs to bring her home, to have her close, to tell her how he thinks he might he possibly; he fucking loves her. It is simple, really. They are all suddenly on a plane over the ocean he traveled four months ago to return to the baggage filled with precious items he so stupidly left behind without cracking it open. The moon is melting with the desert - all milk and honey licking the dunes - and he thinks of her skin. This is her place now and where she is feels right in his whole being. Everything goes according to plan and he is strapped to a chair bitten to wood pieces in a room a million lifetimes and countries and religions from home but he has never felt closer. They beat him with hard-boned knuckles over is inside-bruised body. He is stretching for a flicker of breath but they beat him more. Perhaps they beat him until he his half-alive. But he just smiles. He knows she is here.

**---**

_Now I know, here's where the story ends _

_And I have come to the point of no return_

_When I'm looking back at the times where it all began_

_**I know that I still have much to learn.**_

Death licks his lips as she burns silently under his empty gaze. He entwines the dry straws of her hair and blows soft-hot breath in her blood-rushing ears.

'_Hush, stop your retched screams,'_ whispers he.

She is shivering like a winterleaf under his caress. She sees wrong-turned colors of rainbows as she floats all curled up in the waves of cold blood and fever-soaked sheets. His nails are digging into her bare, blistered-cottoned flesh.

'_Shush, you are ripping your throat open, can't you taste the blood?'_ whispers he.

She cannot find the strength to cry because her body is chain-linked to bleak hopelessness. She is being tugged under surface, the point of no return where salty bubbles will engulf her. Something is a constant, dull pain cutting through her will. Suddenly someone is pulling her up by her broken limbs and her legs are somehow working, muscles starving for oxygen but breathing and flexing all the same. She tries to ask where they are going but her throat is sealed shut with sickness. They stop and the fever-nerves in her palm taste even warmer steel. A door! As they press the handle down oxygen and hope and _finally_ is already making her head dance. The pain is about to suffocate. She already knows the other side is beautiful. She is ready.

Death just smiles.

_**Time, time take me where I'm no longer a stranger.**_

'_You are here,'_ whispers he.

**---**

_I will follow the road down to Africa_

_I just need to see if it's really you and me_

_I will follow the road down to Africa_

_**If that's what it takes, I just need you to know**_

His bones are aching in both broken pain and in anticipation as a woman with a sandbag covering her dirt-licked face is put before him. Then she just sits there and her forgets is injuries that are eating him alive. As they take the bag off he realizes that he is looking into the mouth of the gift horse of beauty. It's true. He was right. One piece inside of him might have doubted but she is here. She is before him and he is astonished and a million emotions whirl inside him, blending with the drug he was given earlier; making him want to tell her just how much he thinks he might he possibly; he fucking loves her. Her brown hair is lying flat on her sun-kissed skull and she has blood filled bows in her face, bathing in a waterfall of sweatcurls. Her lips are caked with drought and her frame is so skinny he fears he will breathe her bones to dust in one caress. But her eyes, oh her eyes. They are more alight than the rays of lava-hot sun that shine in through the hairline fractured windowpanes. They are so warm and soft and they curve slightly at the corners. Like they always are. Normality. Dust fall on her cheekbones like summer snow.

'_I am so, so sorry, Ziva. For everything.'_

She smiles then, all ivory gravel-toothed and he wants to press his fingers into the happy-craters of her cheeks, make them last forever. One hard pull with muscles and longing working together and his hands are suddenly not tied and he can he can, oh he can reach out. His fingertips are shivering on the inside but as they touch the porcelain flesh of her cheek she suddenly fades and melts into the air as beauty-smoke. For what feels like a lifetime he sits and stares on the spot where her life and being was one second ago. Realization washes over him, salty and stinging like wander lusting ocean; soaking his open wounds with despair. She was just a hallucination. She was not real. Just like his screaming, water-starving throat makes up false pretty pictures with puddles, his aching, dry heart makes up pictures of dead lovers. She was just a hallucination. She was not real. Where the fuck did she go? Who took her?

He can feel Death seep into and circle the room, smiling under his breath. He slouches over him, caresses his bird-fleshed arm. Tony wants him to go away, to leave him folding into his own sorrow. But Death is persistent and he whispers questions in Tony's ears. It is silent but loud and the words are quiet breath of wonder.

'_I can make you see her again. Don't you want that?'_ whispers he.

Suddenly Tony smiles, too, all tentative in the warm and cold room. These syllables are wonderful. He wants that. Only that. Just seeing her is enough, really. Just watching her clenches his thirst for her. That's what he came here for. To see her, to be with her. And as he closes his eyes he wishes with all of his destroyed body and smashed tendons and broken bones and pulled muscles and aching, swollen heart for the image of her to come back. He is ready.

Death just smiles.

_**I thought of just your face, relaxed and floated into space.**_

'_You are here,'_ whispers she.

_**---**_

**Thank you for reading. Truth and Consequences with a twist of tragedy. I like writing about misery so I could not wrap the ending in a sugarcloud. And yes, I know 'whispers s/he' should be 's/he whispers' (or that's what my English teacher always told me) but the story is already twisted so why not turn in yet another circle? If you didn't get it (since, yes I know, I write rather confusing) they both died at the end.**

**They can only be together in death.**

**Please review and you are lovely.**


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